Interview with Amy Blackstone, author of Childfree by Choice

I can’t tell you how happy I am that Amy Blackstone, who’s been crazy-busy with interviews lately, agreed to let me ask her some questions about a book I hope will be read not only by adults, but by much younger people just entering the period in their lives when the possibility of children becomes more than the oft-hurled threat of a frustrated parent: “Wait until you have kids!”

After my first two marriages ended in part because I didn’t want children, I was frustrated. Defensive. Angry. Hurt.

I questioned my worth as a human being separate from my biological ability to procreate. But there was also the world at large — TV, magazines, movies, peers, parents, partners — taking for granted that having children was simply what was done. That the idea of motherhood was anathema to me made me wonder if there was something wrong with me.

For a few years, I felt simultaneously attacked by an environment of unfair expectations and defiant and rebellious in my determination to not meet those expectations. I had no desire to be a non-conformist or otherwise “different,” I just didn’t want a child. So, it wasn’t the good kind of fighting feeling, the kind that has you stomping with a “I can, too!” when someone tells you you can’t do something. Instead, it was a constant, subconscious emotional battle to ward off the feelings of inferiority that can develop when you know you’re the odd one out.

Over the years, more and more people, mostly women, started writing about being childfree, but there was little available when I could have used it the most. When in 2013 I discovered the blog We’re {Not} Having a Baby, created by Dr. Amy Blackstone, professor of sociology at the University of Maine, and her husband Lance Blackstone, I so wished they had been there in 1996 for Husband 1 and again in 2002 for Husband 2.

Amy and Lance’s celebratory, positive, and sociological approach to the choice to not have children is something I truly enjoy, and Amy’s decade of work researching, normalizing, and writing about the choice is essential — now more than ever, as political forces do their best to dictate that impregnated women, however that pregnancy came to be, must have children regardless of whether they want them or whether, in some cases, it’s in the best interest of the child and/or mother to have them.